We have been waiting for this for a year and finally the third quarter ended up showing a nice bump in the performance of small-cap stocks. Both the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 were up since the end of the second quarter, but small-cap stocks outperformed the large-cap stocks by double digits. This is important for hedge funds, which are big supporters of small-cap stocks, because their investors started pulling some of their capital out due to poor recent performance. It is very likely that equity hedge funds will deliver better risk adjusted returns in the second half of this year. In this article we are going to look at how this recent market trend affected the sentiment of hedge funds towards American States Water Co (NYSE:AWR), and what that likely means for the prospects of the company and its stock.
American States Water Co (NYSE:AWR) shares didn’t see a lot of action during the third quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 8 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Innospec Inc. (NASDAQ:IOSP), Dynegy Inc. (NYSE:DYN), and Grupo Financiero Galicia S.A. (ADR) (NASDAQ:GGAL) to gather more data points.
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What have hedge funds been doing with American States Water Co (NYSE:AWR)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 8 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 0% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 5 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in AWR heading into this year. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, holds the most valuable position in American States Water Co (NYSE:AWR). Renaissance Technologies has a $33.4 million position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, with a $3.4 million position. Some other members of the smart money that are bullish include Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.
